Representing Religion(s) Educationally

Religious Education takes many different forms (Hull 2002). This project attempts to think about the educational representation of religion(s) in the context of rising forms of ‘non-religion’, post-secularism, and recent debates about the place of Religious Education in England and Wales, in particular the 2018 report by the Commission on Religious Education. The project will also explore larger pedagogical questions of educational representation of religion(s), that include representation in schools, but also the media, museums, and other sites of public education.

The project brings together academics in Religious Studies, Religious Education, and Education Studies to articulate a basis for inclusive RE fit for contemporary societies.

Some initial questions that the project will explore:

• How do we understand education?

• While education can mean a variety of different things, this project focuses on the context of the school classroom, more particularly the Religious Education classroom. In this context, there is an important significance to each corner of the so-called educational triangle (Hudson 2009): the teacher (Biesta 2017); the student; the content. Education involves a complex interaction between these three elements.

• What are we trying to achieve through education?

  • Before considering contents or processes, we must ask what is it we hope to achieve? Do we want to encourage citizenship or prepare for gainful employment? Do we want young people to learn about the local communities in which they live, or to encounter other cultures and communities? Is the primary focus understanding others, or a process of richer self-understanding? As Gadamer suggests, understanding the self and understanding another are deeply related.

• What does it mean to represent something educationally?

  • This project takes up some recent research in Education Studies to explore what is means to make ‘religion(s)’ and ‘worldviews’ into curriculum contents, or what we could also call ‘pedagogical objects.’ Things in the world (like ‘religion(s)’ or ‘worldviews’) are complex and so processes of abstraction, representation and pedagogical reduction are required to ‘organise’ that complexity into pedagogical objects: things that can be taught. But this raises a number of problems. The project takes up some of these problems by asking:

  • What is pedagogical representation and reduction?

  • How can we be inclusive (of all religious and non-religious worldviews) while also being selective?

  • Whose interests govern the formation of pedagogical objects?

• Why After Religious Education?

  • Inspired by Cotter and Robinson’s book After World Religions, the project seeks to re-imagine RE in different terms. We are also inspired by what is widely called the ‘worldviews approach’ to RE that has developed out of the CORE report. The CORE report proposes a new subject name of Religion and Worldviews, and though this is about far more than what to call the subject, the conversation signals a different attitude to the subject; a different way of imagining RE.